The court has given Ohio a hard deadline of June 14 to enact a new congressional map, which the court then will review. #fairmaps 2/

If the state fails to enact a new map, the court will put in place a new map for the 2020 election and has asked to parties to propose special masters by June 3. #fairmaps 3/

The court’s unanimous opinion striking down the Ohio congressional map is 300 pages long, but the court helpfully provides a shorter summary at the start of the opinion 👇#fairmaps 4/

Starting on page 7 of the opinion, the court also gives a detailed breakdown of how the Ohio congressional map was draw in secret in a hotel suite in Columbus with help of national political operatives. #fairmaps 5/

And if you like maps, the Ohio partisan gerrymandering opinion has lots of them - with district by district explanations of how the 2011 gerrymander went down. #fairmaps 6/

On the key question of what role social science plays, the court follows the lead of the court in the North Carolina partisan gerrymandering case - noting starting on page 149 that social science is just one instrument in courts’ evidentiary toolkit. #fairmaps 7/

The Ohio partisan gerrymandering decision is yet another example of lower courts finding it not at all hard to adjudicate partisan gerrymandering claims - despite the angst SCOTUS seems to have. #fairmaps 8/

On the merits, the court ruled for the plaintiffs in the Ohio partisan gerrymandering decision on all of their legal claims - striking down the map on 1st Amendment, 14th Amendment, and Article I grounds. #fairmaps 9/

As to what comes next, it’s all but certain that Ohio will ask SCOTUS to halt the map redrawing process pending a decision in the NC/MD cases - as well as their own appeal. #fairmaps 10/

So, in short, stay tuned for more maneuvering. But, in the mean time, celebrate a big, big win for Ohio voters. #fairmaps 11/

With today’s ruling in the Ohio partisan gerrymandering case - and assuming changes actually get made to the NC, MI & OH maps (looking at you SCOTUS) - all of the worst of this decade’s congressional maps will have seen improvements as a result of litigation. #fairmaps 12/

In fact, it’s possible that only the Texas congressional map - which saw some limited court-ordered modifications in 2012 - will end the decade with high rates of partisan bias. #fairmaps 13/

As the court notes, today’s decision is part of a growing chorus of lower court opinions invalidating partisan gerrymanders. At this point, only the Supreme Court still remains undecided (and that could change by June). #fairmaps 2/

The court in MI ruled for challengers on both equal protection and First Amendment grounds - though some districts were struck down only on the First Amendment grounds. #fairmaps 3/

Under Amendment 1 passed by Missouri voters, responsibility for drawing state house & state senate maps now belongs in the first instance to a newly created non-partisan state demographer, who has to follow new strengthened map drawing rules. #fairmaps 3/

Ohio has one of the most extreme congressional gerrymanders of any state in the country. Even though Democrats flipped the House in 2018, they won just 4 of 16 Ohio House seats. By contrast, this nonpartisan map could have seen them win 3-4 more seats: dailykos.com/story/2019/3/4…

Here's a link to the ruling striking down Ohio's GOP congressional gerrymander

Breaking news: A federal judge ordered Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp to guarantee people flagged as non-citizens through Georgia's "exact match" system can vote in the 2018 election. big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/athena/files/2…

Here is how they can vote:

This is a win for voting rights groups that sued. It deals with a portion of the 53,000 people on the voter registration suspense list.

Overwhelming majority of 53,000 were not flagged for citizenship. They were flagged because their information didn't match with SSN database

This is the judge explaining the problem. Someone can get a driver's license in Georgia if they are not a citizen. If that person then becomes a citizen and registers to vote, the state driver's database will flag them as a non-citizen

Search MS 13 on twitter and you get some sense of how prominent—and unhinged—fear-mongering about the group is in GOP campaigns ongoing across the country. In real life I am a historian of migration and Ctral America, and any serious researcher knows these claims are absurd

MS13 is a vicious criminal gang, born of the dislocations of El Salvador's civil war, whose US presence numbers around 10,000, clustered in a small handful of counties, and whose violence is borne almost exclusively by fellow Ctral Americans propublica.org/article/ms-13-…

Yet in July 2018 fully 51% of Trump voters were either "somewhat" or "a great deal" worried that a member of *their own family* would fall victim to MS 13. 24% believed MS 13 to be the largest gang in the United States: wrong by an order of magnitude big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/athena/files/2…